Holmes raised an eyebrow and tented his long fingers to indicate his attentiveness as the world-famous jeweler went on.
“Europe is a rich source of stones for my firm. The crown jewels of various royal houses may come up for bid at any moment—not that we are not finding superior diamonds fresh from the mine. I confess myself partial to the semiprecious colored gemstones so often overlooked— but there is a romance to a splendid diamond’s history that appeals to the adventurer in us all.”
“Indeed,” Holmes said, his eyes sparkling and fever spots of excitement blossoming on his lean cheeks.
“Have you ever heard of the Zone of Diamonds, sir?”
“Watson, my index!”
I produced the volume, Holmes’s personal encyclopedia, which was filled with odd bits of information useful only to a chronicler of humanity’s eternal dedication to crime.
Holmes paged through in silence. “No reference, but I seem to recall some connection with the unhappy Marie Antoinette.”
“You amaze me, Mr. Holmes. Even in ignorance you are surprisingly knowledgeable. Yes, the Zone belonged to her. It is what its name indicates, a girdle—or belt, if you will—of diamonds. No single stone is superior, but together they make a very pretty chain. She clasped it around the waists of court gowns; it is said to have reached to the floor.”
I whistled under my breath, for such a length of diamonds would be spectacular.
“My exact reaction, Dr. Watson, when I first learned of the piece,” Mr. Tiffany said.
“How long has it been missing?” Holmes asked abruptly. “Since the French Revolution?”
“No, that is what is so ... tempting, Mr. Holmes. The Zone of Diamonds survived the Revolution. Along with the remaining French crown jewels, it was kept in the Tuileries and not lost until the Paris mobs overran those gardens while overthrowing King Louis Philippe in 1848.”
“Thirty-three years ago,” Holmes mused.
“Not much longer than you yourself have been on this planet, I’d imagine,” Tiffany noted.
“It may take infinite time to make diamonds, Mr. Tiffany,” Holmes said crisply, “but the human deductive faculty matures much earlier, I assure you. At least in my case.”
“I believe you, Mr. Holmes,” Tiffany said with a solemn nod. “I am leaving no, er, stone unturned in my search for this object. My best information is that it came to England. I will put all my resources behind this enterprise. I have used private detectives before, notably Pinkerton’s, but they do not have the contacts abroad that this task requires.”
“Mr. Tiffany,” said Holmes, “I am not commonly in the game of finding lost articles. Frankly, it is the singular nature of the cases I take on that intrigues me. Your assignment is a trifling matter of tracing the path of stolen goods; surely, other agents could do as much for you.”
“I should be grateful, Mr. Holmes, if you would look into the matter. Pinkerton’s spoke highly of you, especially your flair for following the unexpected clue. And are you not the world’s only consulting detective?”
“At least the trail is cold and the cast of characters is unknown.” Holmes’s long, agile hands clapped his chair arms in concerted decision. “I am at an interval now, with little to occupy my mind. As Dr. Watson could no doubt tell you, Mr. Tiffany, I become annoyingly restless—even insufferable—at such times. And my family tree does extend a root or two into France, thus my interest in restoring a French queen’s diamonds to history.”
“As the Three Musketeers did once long ago,” Tiffany suggested with a laugh.
Holmes looked at the man as if he had gone mad.
“The Three Musketeers, exactly,” said I hastily, “and the famous incident of the Queen’s diamonds.” Few besides myself knew of Holmes’s abysmal ignorance in matters outside his immediate interest, of which literature was only a single example. “ ‘One for all and all for one,’ you know.”
“A noble motto, Watson,” Holmes said vaguely, rising. “Rest assured that I will bend my best efforts to locating your wandering cincture, Mr. Tiffany.”
“And rest assured that your efforts will be rewarded, Mr. Holmes. I offer my cheque for your preliminary inquiries.”
Holmes accepted it, bowed, handed back the gentleman’s hat and saw him out.
“Think of it, Holmes,” I speculated as he returned to the chamber, “a string of diamonds... why, it must be seven or eight feet long!”
“That’s assuming that Marie Antoinette tied her belt into two tails like an ordinary woman, Watson. There could have been a single strand from waist to floor.”
“Still, a spectacular find, Holmes.”
“Ah, I see,” said he, reaching for his black clay pipe and the Persian slipper fragrant with loose tobacco. “You grow impatient for a more dramatic subject for another of your accounts. My usual problems are too mundane for your literary ambitions—”
“Not at all, my dear fellow!” I protested. “I have learned from our association that no detail is too insignificant to be noticed and that no problem is small to the one it plagues. Aren’t you the slightest bit eager to set out on the trail of this fabulous artifact?”
“Eager, Watson? To trail the glittering slick of a loathsome slug across this green garden of England? Whatever the beauty or worth of this girdle of diamonds, for men it has been nothing but a snare, its sheen dulled by the countless greedy hands through which it has doubtless passed. There is sorrow in its wake, and betrayal and destruction, count upon it.”
“ ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever,’” I rashly quoted the poet. This literary reference was not lost on Holmes, unlike Dumas’s Three Musketeers.
“‘Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together,’ “ Holmes responded, citing Petrarch. “I find it pathetic, Watson, that this ‘thing of beauty,’ this Zone of Diamonds that was once an accessory to a queen will remain as empty a symbol of worldly success to whomever possesses it. In our industrial age, merchant princes and celluloid czars buy such baubles for the vanity of themselves and the women upon whom they bestow their largess so publicly. Better that the Zone stay lost; then it will tempt fewer men to commit more ill deeds than the world needs.”
“Might it not be displayed in some museum?”
Holmes laughed. “Mr. Tiffany is not a curator, but a merchant. He will likely sell the Zone stone by stone and reap a greater value from this subdivision than if he had honored its original form.”
“Surely not, Holmes.”
“Still keen for the treasure hunt, eh, Watson? There is a joy in finding that seldom extends to the having of the found object, I admit. And there is something of the boy in every Englishman in our day, a not undesirable trait. I’ll have a go at it, Watson, but forgive me if I can’t muster enthusiasm for the hunt. I may uncover human misery as well as lost jewels if I look for it; I will certainly do so if I find it”
“When you find it, Holmes.”
“When,” he amended calmly.
Chapter Five
REPAST AT TIFFANY’S
I have never known anyone with so little regard for personal possessions as my friend, Irene Adler. It was not the case that she had no possessions; indeed, even when we first shared modest lodgings in Saffron Hill, the Italian district, her two rooms were crammed to the sconces with the excess of her accumulations.
Like a kitten too curious to be completely timid, I explored the crowded landscape of my new residence by relentless stages. My first discovery was Irene’s utterly cavalier attitude toward her possessions. What was hers, was mine. If my eye strayed too long on an exotically figured shawl, she immediately noticed.
“Catch your fancy, does it, Nell? You may have it.”
“No!” I would protest hastily. Those fevered shades of dye, that deep fringe of swaying silk were not to my taste or, more important, my station in life.
At that Irene would produce another shawl—say, an ivory slubbed silk with a modest eyelash of fringe—from the gaping trunk that spi
lled a dressmaker’s treasure trove upon her bedchamber rug.
“Perhaps this is more to your liking,” she would say with such amused certainty that I almost felt obliged to claim the gaudy one to prove her wrong.
Though I never did any such thing.
Once, frustrated by the profusion littering our two large rooms, I listed the contents. Of furniture there was little and that awash in a sea of accessories. Chief among it was the square piano, the only object kept free of effluvia, so that its lid might be raised. Two easy chairs, both moth-marked under their colorful throws, flanked the hearth. A sway-backed sofa held the opposite wall while a poster of Henry Irving’s Hamlet, with Ellen Terry as Ophelia, played the role of a painting above it.
The mantelpiece was a shelf for assorted kitchen implements—all of them illicit, for cooking was forbidden in our chambers. The mantel’s only decoration was the empty wine bottle Irene and I had shared during our first night together. Now it contained an inverted duster that spilled forth a bouquet of green-and-copper cock feathers in lieu of fresh flowers.
I might add that the feather duster had been seldom disturbed in its repose until I arrived and released it to do its duty.
Irene’s bedchamber—into which she urged me welcome as if it were a noted salon—was even more eccentric. My first foray into this Byzantine retreat nearly gave me a fatal turn when I spied a dark silhouette lurking in an unlit corner.
“La, Nell, don’t let her startle you,” Irene advised. “A lady without her head is not only harmless but useless, although few gentlemen appear to have realized that.”
I studied our silent lodger—a dressmaker’s model with an hourglass torso upholstered in black jersey. Like most such devices, it ended in a metal-capped neck stem, upon which bloomed a large, lavishly pale silk lily. No wonder I had thought for a moment that a ghost with a mutilated face had been haunting us!
Irene assumed a pose beside the manikin, hand on its homely black shoulder, and grinned like a street Arab. “I call her my Jersey Lily,” she said with sly fondness, jabbing a hatpin into the fabric.
“After Lillie Langtry!” I realized with a start. Irene’s wit often took unconventional turns. I came closer to view the figure. “Do you suppose she really... well, you know... with the Prince of Wales, as they say?”
“If she didn’t she’s a fool—or he is a greater one,” Irene retorted.
I had not expected so shocking an answer. “But she is a married woman!”
“The Prince is a married man”
“And she’s a churchman’s daughter.”
“Churchman’s daughters are often the first to fall. It’s such a bore being good when there is so little reward in it.”
“Irene! If I did not know you were jesting I should fear for your soul, or at the least your reputation.”
“I have neither, remember? I am an ‘actress,’” she returned.
“Surely you do not endorse Mrs. Langtry’s immorality?”
“Of course not Yet one cannot fault the cleverness of the woman. Have you seen her? No? I have.”
“What did she look like?” I had not meant to sound so eager.
“I was about to tell you,” Irene said with a smile. “An overrated woman, Nell, with a profile like a hacksaw— that chiseled, masculine silhouette that aesthetic painters like to call Greek.”
“But the picture on Pears’ soap—”
“Is a picture. A drawing. Really, any man of sensitivity would find her no more attractive than a hod carrier. But she does have a certain elan. The evening she met the Prince of Wales she was wearing mourning—solid black with her hair in a discreet little bun. She stood out among the ladies in their gaudy plumage like a grackle among robin red-breasts.”
“And this caught the Prince’s eye?”
“Indeed. In a forest of autumn leaves it is better to be a trifle green than flame-colored and common. Then, too, the Jersey Lily has a habit of going corsetless—a great scoffer at social conventions, she, at least the trivial ones.”
“Corsetless.” Such behavior was incomprehensible to me. “But why...?”
“Say no more. Lillie Langtry has had her day. Now that her liaison with the Prince is over, she has exhibited the bad manners to go upon the stage, thus pushing back into the wings those of us who have won our places by dint of talent and long study; meanwhile she absconds with the limelight.”
Irene seemed genuinely irritated for a moment. “Ah, it is hard to succeed in an immoral profession, Nell, when immoral nonprofessional upstarts take to the boards.”
“Your cynicism doesn’t shock me, as you mean it to, Irene,” I assured her insincerely. “You would never lead such a life as she, not even to advance your singing career.”
“No,” Irene agreed, her face sobering. The hatpin stabbed another pinch of taut black jersey. “I refuse to win my plaudits in a horizontal position, like a pincushion, and will likely see little success in life for it.”
“Perhaps you will marry and retire from the stage.”
“Never! Marriage is the same tawdry exchange of freedom for security, and that a false one, for the husband can command all that a wife may do. Marriage is merely a bargain sealed with civil and religious rites instead of unspoken social customs.”
“I myself have always regarded marriage as sacred, a woman’s highest calling. Circumstances may put the state beyond the reach of some women”—here my sad recollection of Jasper Higgenbottom’s illness and absence clotted my voice before I recovered and went on—”but at least we treasure the mirage of it. Now you call even matrimony a snare and a delusion. You quite make me despair for a woman’s lot.”
“Oh, don’t despair, Nell. No. Because the many choose to leave their fates unquestioned, like witless sheep herded through gates, does not mean a few nimble lambs can’t leap the traces and go merrily down the lane.”
She turned away from the rather gruesome Jersey Lily with a smile. “Speaking of leaping traces, you must help me decide what to wear. I have an important interview Tuesday morning next.”
“Is it the new opera? The Gilbert and Sullivan?”
Irene shook her head. “Nothing so commonplace. I am to see Mr. Tiffany.”
“Mr.Tiffany?”
“The famous New York jeweler! Do you live with your head in a barrel?”
“Usually in a bonnet,” I retorted, more disturbed by the implications of the “Mr.” than the ‘Tiffany.” “But surely you are not going to New York?”
“Hardly. I am fleet, but I do not have wings. Mr. Tiffany will come to me, or rather, I will go to his hotel in Trafalgar Square.”
“You cannot”
“Whyever not?”
“Go to his hotel? Alone? And in the morning? You might be taken for an—”
“An actress? Yes, I know. But do you not see, Nell, what an opportunity this is? Charles Lewis Tiffany is consulting me on a matter of confidential importance! The Pinkerton Detective Agency has directed him to me. Would you rather he came here?”
“Heavens, no! That would be even more improper.”
“Besides, Morley’s is a very fine hotel. I shall endure no more comment than Mrs. Langtry would if she did the same.”
“That settles it. I shall accompany you.”
“I’ve never heard you sound so determined, Nell. Shall you not be also subjected to unwelcome speculation?”
“That doesn’t matter.” I squared my shoulders. “Let them speak against two of us.”
“Well said.” Irene smiled. “Your presence might lend a certain weight to the occasion. I could say you were my secretary.”
“That would be a lie,” I began dubiously.
“Not if you take notes,” she came back triumphantly.
“Well, no, not if I take notes.”
“Then it is settled. We will see Mr. Tiffany at Morley’s Tuesday next, where you will take notes. And now you will help me choose the proper costume for this important rendezvous of ours.”
&nbs
p; This I did, for I found it increasingly amusing to outfit Irene. Despite its lavish appearance, her wardrobe consisted of surprisingly few ensembles. The jumble of hand-me-down trims she collected in street markets transformed this raw material to fit any occasion, station in life or mood that suited her.
Nor did Irene give a fig leaf for how nicely she accomplished her transformations. Often of an evening I, who had been taught to sew spider web-fine stitches, would watch Irene driving her large-eyed needle in great galloping strides as she affixed a glittering swag of trim to a plain-Jane gown. The same long, loose stitches would be as roughly ripped free when the gown required another change of character.
For our meeting with the famed jeweler, we settled upon what Irene called “bourgeois dignity.” I dressed with my usual quiet rectitude, though I admit that my gloves clung damply to my palms as we took the early omnibus to Trafalgar Square Tuesday.
Morley’s presented a solidly reassuring façade overlooking the mounted statue of Charles I. Yet I was more intrigued by the Time Signal Ball above the Electric Telegraph Office to our right, a device that gave a precise reading of Greenwich Mean Time in central London.
Such ingenious inventions greatly consoled me for the crowded city bustle. Pneumatic pressure raised a six-foot-diameter zinc ball that was dropped ten feet at precisely one o’clock daily, thus activating an electric current transmitted direct from the Greenwich Observatory. By the sphere’s daily plummet, all London could set its watches and clocks accurately, and I took full advantage of this convenience.
On our left the fool’s-capped steeple of St-Martin-in-the-Fields church loomed over the hotel’s lowlier bulk, which I thought reassuring for our enterprise.
Thus sandwiched, as it were, between God and modern science, Irene and I glided into Morley’s Hotel. Heavy Turkish carpet discreetly hushed our footfalls within as we were ushered to a private dining room. The coffered double doors sprang open on a spry old gentleman with a stern but kindly face.
“Miss Irene Adler?” he inquired, looking from one to the other.
Good Night, Mr. Holmes (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 6